How to recognize and protect yourself from work-at-home online scams

March 29, 2010 · Posted in Biz Mgt & Dev, Entrepreneurship, The Internet, eCommerce / eBiz 

There is always the possibility of scams in almost any kind of job, yet, it seems that online jobs are easier to scam these days. If you are vulnerable, you will easily fall for their promises, rewards, and easy hiring procedure, which all turn out to be empty. The presence of these online job scams, unfortunately, makes finding the real jobs rather hard. This is because scammers have defined more sophisticated schemes to make their phony online jobs appear legitimate. And usually, you only find that out come payment time. So how do you avoid such working online scams? How can you tell an online job is genuine or is a mere scam?

Here are some of the warning signs of online job scams. If you spot any of them in your potential job prospects, trash it. You might be looking at a scam.

  1. Asks for money. If a potential employer charges fees for more job and company information, start-up kit, training, software, or hiring you, it is most likely a scam. In the first place, you are not supposed to give money to an employer; it’s the other way around.
  2. Describes itself as legitimate. If what is said about a job is more on its legitimacy but less on the company, pay, nature, and other important details, beware. This is probably just one of the marketing strategies.
  3. Promises big and quick cash. Forget the job that says, “Get rich quick. Earn $1000 weekly.” Or anything of that sort. The truth is, no job can promise you fast financial success. It takes time. It takes hard labor. Such claims are typical to scams.
  4. Requires no experience or skill at all. A real job needs to be done by qualified individuals. If an employer says there is little effort on your part, forget it. A legitimate employer wouldn’t entrust an important job to unreliable people. It would be a waste of their money.
  5. Comes from an unsolicited email. A job posting you know you haven’t applied to and which appears in an unsolicited email message is most often a scam. Coming from an unsolicited email message, in itself, is quite suspicious.
  6. Has a questionable website. A legitimate company normally provides complete contact details in its website. The absence of which might be an indicative it is a scam. If it also tells less about the company history, nature, and what it stands for, be careful.

What to do
The rule of thumb when looking for legitimate online jobs is to do a thorough research. If you find a company rather dubious, look it up in the web by typing the company name and the word “scam” in the search box. The search results can tell you whether a company is reputable.

You can also contact the employer. Ask for important details about the job such as the salary, mode of payment, and other job details not mentioned in the ad post. If the response is somewhat shady, you may want to skip that job out. An employer can tell all the job details upfront if it is legitimate.

To be more assured of the legitimacy of the job, you can ask for a list of references. It should include the company’s employees and contractors. Inquire from them how it is working for the company. Their responses should help you determine whether a job is a scam. Remember, you need to be very careful and decisive when taking on a potential job, as working online scams are growing in number.

Bookmark and Share

Thought you should know, etc... Update

Sony Turning to Medical-Imaging Chips

Equipment that exploits an edge in disease-detecting technologies could revive Sony, says incoming Chief Executive Officer Kazuo Hirai

Google Testing New Gadget

Google is working on a new entertainment device that will rely on wireless networking, according to a FCC filing

Intel Antitrust Suit to Be Dropped in N.Y.

New York has ended its more than two-year-old antitrust suit against Intel without imposing any fines or restrictions

U.S. Air Force May Buy 18,000 Apple IPad 2s for Flight Crews

The U.S. Air Force may buy as many as 18,000 iPad 2s in what would be one of the military’s biggest orders of computer tablets, accelerating Apple Inc.’s inroads into the federal government.

TomTom Rises After Rabo Raises Recommendation: Amsterdam Mover

TomTom NV, Europe’s biggest maker of portable navigation devices, rose to the highest in seven months after Rabo Securities raised its recommendation, citing strong automotive sales and a potential Apple Inc. mapping deal.

Tags: , , , ,

Comments

Leave a Reply




  • Your Shopping Cart

    Your cart is empty

  • Calendar

    March 2010
    M T W T F S S
    « Feb   Apr »
    1234567
    891011121314
    15161718192021
    22232425262728
    293031  

  • RSS From the National Vulnerability Database

    • CVE-2011-3958 (chrome) February 7, 2012
      Google Chrome before 17.0.963.46 does not properly perform casts of variables during handling of a column span, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted document. […]
      nvd@nist.gov
    • CVE-2012-1033 (bind) February 7, 2012
      The resolver in ISC BIND 9 through 9.8.1-P1 does not properly implement a cache update policy, which allows remote attackers to trigger continued resolvability of domain names that are no longer registered via an unspecified "Ghost Names exploit." […]
      nvd@nist.gov
    • CVE-2011-3971 (chrome) February 7, 2012
      Use-after-free vulnerability in Google Chrome before 17.0.963.46 allows user-assisted remote attackers to cause a denial of service or possibly have unspecified other impact via vectors related to mousemove events. […]
      nvd@nist.gov
    • CVE-2011-3954 (chrome) February 7, 2012
      Google Chrome before 17.0.963.46 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) via vectors that trigger a large amount of database usage. […]
      nvd@nist.gov
    • CVE-2011-3970 (chrome, libxslt) February 7, 2012
      libxslt, as used in Google Chrome before 17.0.963.46, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds read) via unspecified vectors. […]
      nvd@nist.gov
    • CVE-2012-0926 (realplayer, realplayer_sp) February 7, 2012
      The RV10 codec in RealNetworks RealPlayer 11.x, 14.x, and 15.x before 15.02.71, and RealPlayer SP 1.0 through 1.1.5, does not properly handle height and width values, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted RV10 RealVideo video stream. […]
      nvd@nist.gov
    • CVE-2011-3969 (chrome) February 7, 2012
      Use-after-free vulnerability in Google Chrome before 17.0.963.46 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service or possibly have unspecified other impact via vectors related to layout of SVG documents. […]
      nvd@nist.gov
    • CVE-2011-3956 (chrome) February 7, 2012
      The extension implementation in Google Chrome before 17.0.963.46 does not properly handle sandboxed origins, which might allow remote attackers to bypass the Same Origin Policy via a crafted extension. […]
      nvd@nist.gov
    • CVE-2011-3968 (chrome) February 7, 2012
      Use-after-free vulnerability in Google Chrome before 17.0.963.46 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service or possibly have unspecified other impact via vectors involving Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) token sequences. […]
      nvd@nist.gov
    • CVE-2012-1035 (ada_web_services) February 7, 2012
      AdaCore Ada Web Services (AWS) before 2.10.2 computes hash values for form parameters without restricting the ability to trigger hash collisions predictably, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (CPU consumption) by sending many crafted parameters. […]
      nvd@nist.gov
Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes